Mid-purchase of Acme water, I turned. A young shopper was pointing to a wall of swollen polythene bags. Satabdi Shome’s installation, Reality.

“Oshudh naki?” he asked again.

“It’s installation art,” I interjected, helpfully (I thought). “The whole street has been taken over by these projects.”

“Charukala (fine art) students?”

“Yes, probably. Jog, an artists’ collective.”

He pointed at the only “traditional” work on the street, a painting with a multipronged figure. Juncture by Fahima Binte Zahed.

“I understand that work. I know that one is shilpa (art). But, polythene bags?”

“Arre bhai (listen brother),” his companion interrupted, “did your father think there would be something called a mobile phone? Everything changes, why not shilpa?”

He seemed to like this explanation, turning away from me and launching into a discussion with his friend. This was healthy. Not dismissal, just questioning.

Throughout the day, I observed similar viewers—puzzled, curious, and eventually engaged with the work. They were not only—as is common in many Dhaka openings—friends of the artists or invited guests, but people just passing through. Cheragee Pahar is a crucial walkway because of the presence of Batighar bookshop and various newspaper offices (one of the papers, Shuprobhat, gently lampooned in Afsana Sharmin Jhuma’s installation Don’t Worry, Shuprobhat). Batighor was one of two shops in the area carrying a book I had been involved with co-editing, Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism, and this had been my entry point into local cultural nodes.

As the crowds swelled in the street, each installation attracted a cluster. Each work faced the same question: Eta ki (what is this)?Only a performance by shaggy-maned Mishuk Ehsan—announced by a loudspeaker mimicking a movie trailer in a mohashomarohe shubhomukti (“coming soon”) voice—drew a less-than-capacity crowd­­ (it was, by design, too loud to approach). A corner dab-wala (green coconut seller)did roaring business and created a mountain of trash, an involuntary conscript into the show.

Load-shedding of electricity ended on the hour and the lights of Cheragee came back on. It was early evening, so I had not noticed the absent lights. Now as the circuits reconnected, I realized that some of the works had been sitting as if half-blind, waiting for electricity. The spot lighting for Sohrab Jahan’s . . . & Zoo, Ripon Saha’s Third Law of Emotion, and Shaela Sharmin’s Spicy Story were ceremonial, not essential. But for other works, including Bivol Shaha’s We are Fine, Palash Bhattacharjee’s Horn, Sharad Das’s My Father’s Chair, Arup Barua’s Stress, andZihan Karim’s A Simple Death, electric circuits brought the machine to life. The crowd swelled further.

People surged and followed, creating a thick, enthusiastic cordon around the interactive works and performances. I could still make out the essentials of what was happening in Aloptogin Tushar’s Banana 5 (live drawing), Smita Purakayostho’s Don’t Try this at Home (a suspended carrom game board), Mehrun Akter Sumi’s Onushoron (a blind man’s guide meeting a tug of war), Zesika Tasnim’s Floating Wish (a flotilla of paper boats) and Farah Naz Moon’s Ami Jani Tui . . . Tumi (a ludo board as body drapery). But the crowds were too dense to allow a clear sightline. Full house!

I fell back and talked with Dhali al Mamoon and Dilara Jolly. Many of the artists here were either current or former students of theirs, and both seemed exhilarated at how their interventions were now yielding such diverse results.

***

While the Bengali Muslim domination of the Bangladeshi art scene is slightly lessened in Chittagong, performance artist Joydeb Roaja (Khelaram khele ja, Dekharam dekhe ja [Player play on, Audience look on]) is one of the very few indigenous Jumma artists in the district, and certainly the only one at the Cheragee show. Here also, I was disappointed not to see Adivasi audiences at Cheragee—perhaps Jog’sdependence on their own networks kept the audience strictly Bengali, a major lapse in the home district of the gradual erasure of Adivasi identity by the Bangladeshi state. (The term Adivasi refers to the indigenous peoples of the subcontinent.)

When the visual arts are considered an appendage—a luxury or shokh—the underrepresentation of minority communities becomes even more pronounced. At a talk given by the Jog artists, Roaja claimed that performance art gave him freedom because it allowed him to work in raw, confrontational formats, with minimal expenses (not for him, perhaps, a “sponsored by Robbialac” banner).

Jog curator Yuvraj (a.k.a. Zahed A. Chowdhury, an associate professor of painting at Charukala) talks about the challenges of finding Adivasi artists. Even a few years ago, Charukala Institute would only see a rare Adivasi, and always from the dominant Chakma or Marma communities that had some family presence in Bandarban or Rangamati. Only in the last few years had he seen any students from Bawm and Chak communities. Expanded Adivasi quotas in admissions would constitute affirmative action, but can traumatized public universities ever take such a visionary step? When I asked Joydeb who the other young Adivasi artists were (the post-Kanak Chapa Chakma generation), he named Udoy Sonkor Chakma, Bimol Chakma, Vobesh Chakma, Bablu Chakma, Doyal Mohan Chakma, Obonti Chakma and Jigmun Bom in Chittagong; and in Dhaka, Shapu Tripura and Milon Tripura. Parsing the names alone, I could see that the majority was from the Chakma indigenous group, with a much smaller segment being from the Tripura and Bom groups. This reflected the Adivasi communities’ own internal lines of hegemony. Overall, the community was under Bengali settler and military domination, but internally, at least for such limited things as university admissions, Chakma groups usually dominated. Chakma dominated or not, as a list of indigenous artists, this was much too short!

In 2004, Dhali al Mamoon completed Water is Innocent!, probably the first large-scale installation mourning the act of state aggression against Adivasis that was development of Kaptai Hydroelectric Dam. In the years since, there has been very little work by Bengali or Adivasi artists on the continuing crisis in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. There is an urgent need for artists to break with the state’s chokehold on our ways of seeing ourselves. Jog has not yet built a new paradigm, but Roaja’s work is at least a visible marker.

***

Installation and performance art are not included in the syllabus of any Bangladeshi Charukala, and Chittagong is no exception. But the city’s position in the periphery has made it more open to experimentation. Rajdhanite khub antorikota’r obhab (there is a lack of sincerity in the capital). It’s an overused complaint, but somewhat true. At many Dhaka shows, a sense of wonder has been lost. People are increasingly present not to lose themselves in a sensory experience, but to figure out the angles: Is this the new thing? Who is funding this? What’s in it for me? Brains on overdrive with no time for contemplation.

The port city has its own character, expressed, for example, in the bond of private dialect among Chittagonians. Professor Nisar Hossain of Dhaka University describes Chittagong’s self-contained character as ancholikota’r taan (the pull of regionalism), which allows fluid dialogue between generations. Rashid Chowdhury and Murtaza Bashir’s shilpa andolon (arts movement) of the 1970s, transmitted to Faizul Azim Jacob, Alok Roy, and Abul Mansur, then five years later to Dhali Al Mamoon, and finally today to Cheragee Pahar. The first master’s degree in fine arts started in Chittagong, and a quiet tradition of theoretical practice continues alongside the honing of craft.

Chittagong is not a hinterland by any stretch of the imagination (hello, cargo supertankers!), but its art scene retains essential breathing space. Experimental collectives like Jogare still limited and when asked about the link with Porapara, I learned that some artists crossed between the two organizations. But being off the grid has helped the scene tremendously; whatever has developed has been organic, resulting in a confidence that feels comfortable and without arrogance. The longer it can resist the siren call of Euro-American or Dhaka curators on “discovery” safari, the better the space can develop.

According to Mohaiemen, being largely “off the grid” has helped the Chittagong art scene to develop its own style and attitude. Where and how else has this happened?

MichaelJWilson

Of course, in considering this question, we must also ask whose grid is being referred to, and what area it is seen to delineate. Individual scenes can be extremely active and even innovative in their own right without communicating much with a wider world, and perhaps that’s OK, but anyone investing substantial time and effort within a small or isolated place will ultimately face the “big fish in a small pond” dilemma–to stay put and rise to “the top” (however that is interpreted) or leave and risk disappearance. In a globalized art world, it takes a special kind of loyalty and perseverance to work without at least the potential for wider exposure or acceptance, and to avoid outside influence is also to risk reinventing the wheel. The most exciting scene imaginable might be one that drove outside viewers to seek it out without depending on the oxygen of publicity to remain vital and productive. An impossibility?

Naeem Mohaiemen

I am not suggesting that people should not communicate with a wider world. In any case, that’s not happening even now. The Chittagong artists are fully connected and exposed to a world of influences, whether outside the district boundaries of Chittagong to the rest of Bangladesh, or outside the territorial boundaries of Bangladesh to the Subcontinent, or South Asia, and then even wider still.

My point about “madding crowd” was not referring to communication among equals and peers. It was specifically about art circulation circuits, especially galleries and curators, and especially western galleries and curators. The power imbalance is so wide in that scenario, that it is no longer dialogue between equals. Then it acquires more of the contours of order/obey, superior/dependent, etc. Of course this is not always the case, and there are ways to subvert this as well, and there are people who are particularly well situated to defy this power pressure. But the power imbalance does happen, and it changes the work being produced, and its circulation. This is especially relevant if a scene is just starting to grow and is at an early, fragile state.

More on this later…

MichaelJWilson

A question for you, Naeem: In your experience, have you found that scenes distant from the art world’s commercial hubs tend sometimes to turn inward, consciously or unconsciously rejecting a wider world even when it is increasingly accessible to them via the web and other means? I’ve sometimes found there to be a perhaps understandable but ultimately self-defeating resentment in such communities that steers them away from a broader engagement with potentially sympathetic parties (whether equals and peers or gallerists and curators) internationally in favor of a defensive retreat into the local for its own sake. A related point: Even in an age when international travel is readily available, it’s still not always affordable, so isn’t berating Western art professionals for ignoring emergent Asian scenes feels a little harsh. Major collectors may have the budget for this; employees of all but the biggest museums and galleries generally do not, however much they might like to be responsible for helping a scene to grow.

MichaelJWilson

In 2009, I proposed an event to be titled “The Possibility of an Island”: The First Surtsey Biennial. The plan was to stage an international art exhibition on Surtsey, an uninhabited island off the Southern coast of Iceland. Surtsey was formed by an undersea volcanic eruption that lasted from 1963 to 1967, and has been legally protected from human intervention since its formation. It remains a pristine natural laboratory, its only building a small hut used by visiting scientists. To stage a biennial in such a location would of course be impossible, so “The Possibility of an Island” remains just that, a purely theoretical phenomena, a rumor, a line on a resume, and a way of thinking about art as a human product that brings an influence to bear on its natural environment.

Naeem Mohaiemen

This is an intriguing title for a speculative biennial, referencing Michel Houllebecq’s novel. Houllebecq, as I have written elsewhere, presents a curious mix of end-times sexual nihilism, anomie as DNA of all life, and a toxic strand of anti-immigrant venom (the last especially in his earlier work). The New Yorker review of his book had this summary which I found apropos: “It is to Houellebecq’s discredit, or at least to his novel’s disadvantage, that his thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity in its traditional occupations and sentiments prevents him from creating characters whose conflicts and aspirations the reader can care about.”

MichaelJWilson

Call me a cynic, but I find Houellebecq’s contrarian bad-temperedness rather bracing, at least in short-novel-length doses. I’d agree of course, however, that his characters tend to be extraordinarily unappealing; their racist tendencies in particular seem so utterly misguided that I find them very hard to take seriously, at least as a potential representation of the author’s own views. Houellebecq’s most recent book, 2012’s “The Map and the Territory” is perhaps less bitter-and-twisted than that which I reference in my alternate-world biennial’s title, but does have added plot interest for a gallery-going audience of a contemporary art-world setting.

http://www.facebook.com/danny.hassan.14 Danny Hassan

Chittagong was always a city blessed by the nearby sea…and the port town always been a part of mystery owing to the tales and art that the sea and the sailors bring from time to time….